It's looking very much like a gorgeous Tuesday across Minnesota, Wisconsin, much of Michigan, and the rest of the Upper Midwest. That wasn't quite the case on Monday which saw some smoky, hazy skies reminiscent of the summer of 2023, all driven by wildfires in Canada.
Those fires, raging in British Columbia and Alberta, filled the skies with haze over parts of Montana, the Dakotas, Minnesota and Wisconsin on Sunday, lingering into Monday and causing several Air Quality Alerts to be issued.
Is this going to be a summer-long issue again in 2024?
"The honest answer is, I don't know and I don't think anybody knows," says WCCO Radio Chief Meteorologist Paul Douglas. "To be able to answer the question, we would have to know when the thunderstorms with lightening will strike parts of Western Canada upwind. And how bad those fires will be, will the rain be sufficient to extinguish some of those fires before they really get big, and there's just no way to know that."
Douglas says conditions in Canada are ripe for fires, and it's becoming a new normal thanks to a changing climate.
"We do know that much of Canada, especially Western Canada, is in a long term drought," Douglas says. "So, the soil is dry. The brush is dry. And we are seeing more thunderstorms, on a routine basis, farther north, up into the Northwest Territories, in addition to British Columbia and Alberta. So you've got a convergence of factors."
Douglas says one thing that made 2023 so difficult was a significant May heatwave in Canada that dried things out overnight.
"Then it was followed by thunderstorms, which ignited these fires," says Douglas. "And my understanding is they were so big, so vast, not many roads into that area, the authorities literally had to wait until rain put these fires out. You have these mega-fires and at some point, what can you do?"
All of that leads to a continuing battle with smoke-filled skies for states that bump up against that part of the world. More fires will break out in Canada in 2024 and beyond.
In Minnesota, the air improved significantly Tuesday with only the southwest portion of the state seeing some smoke. Conditions will continue to improve Wednesday and Thursday, but the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency says a strong low pressure is forecast to track eastward over southern Canada late Friday and Saturday meaning they'll keep an eye out for another the possibility of another dose of wildfire smoke over the weekend.
"I think it's going to be a fixture much of the summer," predicts Douglas. "We're going to have beautiful days with great visibility and a blue sky. Other days will be hazy, murky, like looking up through a dirty aquarium like we had (Monday) with the Air Quality Alert. I hope it's not as bad as last summer, but again, we simply don't know."
Prevailing winds could send the smoke south and east as far as Iowa and Chicago, leaving skies looking milky by late Tuesday or early Wednesday, said Rafal Ogorek, a meteorologist in the National Weather Service’s Chicago office. Most of the smoke was expected to linger over Minnesota, Wisconsin and northern Michigan, hanging between a mile (1.6 kilometers) and 2 miles (3 kilometers) above the ground.
A record number of wildfires in 2023 forced more than 235,000 people across Canada to evacuate and sent thick smoke into parts of the U.S., prompting hazy skies and health advisories in multiple U.S. cities.
There were 200 fires burning in Canada by mid-May last year, compared with 90 fires as of this Sunday, said Dave Phillips, senior climatologist at Environment and Climate Change Canada, a government environmental protection agency. A fire raging near Fort Nelson in British Columbia’s far northeastern corner has forced evacuations.
The chances of more wildfires this summer appear high. Lightning strikes could trigger fires that quickly spread in forests suffering intense drought in northeastern British Columbia, northwestern Alberta and the southern Northwest Territories, according the Canadian National Wildland Fire Situation report.
An analysis by World Weather Attribution, an initiative that aims to quickly evaluate the role of climate change in the aftermath of extreme weather events, found climate change more than doubled the chances of hot, dry weather that helped fuel the fire season.
Loretta Mickley, co-leader of Harvard University’s Atmospheric Chemistry Modeling Group, said her group did papers in 2013 and 2015 looking at fire activity and ecosystems with an eye toward the future. She said increasing fire activity is consistent with a warming climate.
Drought conditions look to be less severe in Ontario and Quebec in the coming months, but temperatures are expected to be higher than normal, and it’s difficult to predict if the moisture will cancel out the heat, she said.
“What will happen this summer? It depends on what the meteorology is like today and what happened over the winter,” she said. “In some regions a lot of rain in winter led to abundant vegetation. If that is followed by dryness or a drought then all that vegetation is ready to be burnt up and provide fuel to the fires.”
If Canada does see a repeat of last year’s fire season, it’s far from clear if the U.S. will get haze on the scale of 2023. Fires in Quebec and Ontario produced most of the smoke that enveloped The Eastern U.S. — but those regions rarely see such large fires. Instead of pushing the smoke east the wind drove it south, covering the eastern quarter of the U.S. from the Mississippi River Valley to Manhattan with haze.
“It was an unfortunate, odd kind of weather pattern where you had winds encouraging that air to come south and then east,” said Phillips, of the Canadian environmental protection agency. “And it was just a shock to meteorologists, to the world and to everyone who had to endure it ... I think it will be a fraction of a concern as it was last year.”
The Associated Press contributed to this story.